We’ve been working tirelessly to resolve this issue for the last week, and I’m happy to report that we’ve found a solution! We’ll be pushing out this fix and re-encoding the affected files. We expect all instances of this problem to be absolved by the end of this week. If any of you experience further issues downloading custom clips from WMV after the end of this week, please report your issues to Customer Support. In the meantime, you can continue downloading custom clips using the new custom clip method and downloading your clips in H.264 format. When using the new custom clip mode, simply select either the “iPhone” or “H264″ file format. Again, I apologize for the recent issues with WMV files — we definitely hear your reports of such problems, and our main priority is to ensure that you have the best user experience on Videobox.

Savannah Gold was seriously injured in an apparent home invasion. Many thanks to fellow members Dreamzkape and decroder for bringing the story to my attention. The Sun broke the news in its July 27th publication. Here is their account:

A dad was caged yesterday for throttling porn star Savannah Gold and slitting her throat. The busty actress-turned-escort was found naked and pouring with blood after neighbours in South London heard screams.

Many questions remain unanswered. What is Savannah’s current condition? When did the assault take place?

The Sun reports the attacker was sentenced to a minimum of eight years in prison.

To my friends in the UK, please help me out. How fast does a case move through the UK judicial system? If this event occurred in the US, it would probably be many months, if not years from the date of the crime to the date of the sentencing.

If anyone has any further information, please leave a reply to the post.

Along with the new playlist functionality, VideoBox added some options to Clips yesterday that I think are a nice upgrade to an already cool feature.

If you haven’t tried out Clips yet, you can check out my quick guide to how to use them to get up to speed. For those already familiar with the feature, you may have noticed two new options when you create a Clip: Select a List for This Clip and Select an Image for This Clip.

As you may already know, you can make favorites lists for your Clips the same way you can for scenes and DVDs. Now, when you create a clip, you can add it directly to the list(s) of your choice – which means you can make a custom playlist of clips for your viewing pleasure.

You may notice some new features on the right sidebar when you watch a Flash video today. VideoBox has added a new module that will allow you to make playlists, change their order, loop them and more.

Click images to enlarge

I, like many of you, have wanted this kind of functionality for a long time. So I’m really excited that the VideoBox developers were able to make it happen. Read on for an explanation of how everything works and what you can do with it.

I have a feeling this still-developing story may end up being the most talked about of 2010. It’s really got everything – lies, blackmail, secret identities, arrests, and an underage girl.

The classy gentleman pictured to the left is Michael Storm, aka Dirty D. He is being accused of knowingly filming a scene with a minor. Specifically “two counts of the promotion of a sexual performance of a child, two counts of the use of a child in a sexual performance and one count of illegal computer pornography, which refers to the streaming of underage content.”

Her Story
The accusations are being made by a girl who usually goes by the name Kelsey Cummings (she has several aliases). Her story is that she was contacted by Dirty D via her account on a modeling website and was asked to do a porn scene. She told him she was 17, but he said it wasn’t a problem because she’s married (to a porn performer, in fact). She says okay, procures an ID from another woman who looks nothing like her, and shoots a scene on a Sybian.

As you are likely aware, we’ve been quite busy lately bringing some significant user enhancements to the table. We’re aggressively working on a number of changes that we anticipate will raise the bar and bring your videobox experience to a whole new level.

However, there’s definitely a vocal set of our community that’s been raising concerns about other areas of the site they’d like some attention on. And we hear you.

We are hearing a great deal of interest in handling star name variations (aliases) in searches. For example, searching for Babaloo should also return Babalu, Babalu Monike, Bab Lu, and of course, Babau.

We have a number of interesting ideas around how to solve this, but before we get too fancy, we have a set of engineers focused on getting a minimal functionality in place ASAP. We’re going to roll out a revised search functionality that’ll return all of a stars aliases when you’re searching for any one of them. Once we have that and some additional time we’ll likely put some energy into a more dynamic searching capability.

We hope to have this out in the very near future and I’ll update the blog when we do.

Thanks go out to ropeadope for providing the star names in this blog/puzzle

Once again, I have the honor of announcing site enhancements for your browsing and playback pleasure. We’ve worked extremely hard at making these as “game changing” as we could for your benefit. I think we’ve done a great job, and it’s only the beginning.

In 1969, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the case of Stanley v Georgia, unanimously concluding that a person has the right to watch pornography in the privacy of his or her own home. In the decision, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote:

Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one’s own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.

With this in mind, the news that federal prosecutors in Washington D.C. are attempting to force a company to turn over records that divulge the names and addresses of people who purchased “obscene” materials is puzzling at best and frightening at worst.

A company named only as Company X has been served with three Grand Jury subpoenas requesting business records and 2257 documentation – not uncommon or unreasonable in a prosecution of this type. But the fourth subpoena demands “a copy of records that show the identity of all movies sold or distributed, including the date of each transaction, payment received, and method and date of each of each shipment, from customer purchases” from the company’s website that occurred during 15-day windows in December 2007 and April 2008.

The company offered invoices with customer names and addresses blacked out, but the Dept of Justice demanded the originals that included personal information for everyone who purchased adult videos from this company in those time periods. While the judge presiding over the Grand Jury had the good sense to reject the prosecutors’ insistence that the documents show personal customer information, the motives of the Justice Department are open to speculation.

Could the DoJ be planning to go after consumers of adult materials in the future? It’s hard to say, but important to note that while possessing obscene materials is not a crime, receiving them is. I’m not sure how a person comes to possess anything without first receiving it, but the bottom line is that the feds may be considering stepping over a boundary that would put porn consumers in jeopardy.

Even though VideoBox has content standards and a business model that make it an extremely unlikely target for government witch hunts, I felt it was important that we all, as consumers of adult entertainment, know what’s happening elsewhere in the world of porn. The Grand Jury hasn’t made any indictments yet, so let’s hope that rationality prevails and Company X (whoever they are) doesn’t end up like Rob Zicari, Janet Romano or Max Hardcore.

Here’s a little update for folks who may not have the time or desire to read all the industry “news” and gossip blogs out there.

Tera Patrick Retires from Porn
After filing for divorce from husband Evan Seinfeld (Spyder Jonez), Tera Patrick has told industry blogger Cindi Loftus that she is finished with porn. She has a memoir coming out soon that she claims gets into the scandalous details of her life in porn. I’ll let you guys know if it’s any good.

Katja Kassin Also Calls it Quits
Katja Kassin wrote a message to her fans on the Adult DVD Talk message board that broke the news that she is retiring from porn. She simply seems to have gotten to the end of the road and is looking for something else to do. Luckily for her fans, she shot over 450 movies in her career, hopefully leaving even die hard fans plenty of viewing material for the foreseeable future.

Former UFC Fighter Ruins Birthday Party
At a recent birthday party for Brooke Haven, ex-fighter and current porn “star” War Machine attacked five men, sending two to the hospital. It’s not entirely clear what happened, but it seems that the men were alerted that Mr. Machine had just hit girl/friend Alanah Rae in the face and verbally confronted him about it. (Alanah says she was not hit.) WM claims self-defense, but all witnesses who have come forward thus far said the attack was unprovoked. War Machine is also currently facing charges for attacking a doorman at a gay club in Las Vegas.

New Study: Porn is Okay After All
The University of Montreal School of Social work has released results from a study examining the effects of pornography on men’s attitudes about women and relationships. A sample of 20 hetersexual men revealed that almost all men watch porn at times and that viewing porn has no bearing on their ability to respect women and function normally in society. While 20 is not even close to a reasonable sample size, it comes as no surprise to me that most men don’t want to date girls who look like porn stars, they merely want to jerk off to (on?) them.

Penny Flame Gets Blog on Huffington Post
The Huffington Post, a liberal news and opinion site, has secured Jennifer Ketcham (aka Penny Flame) as a contributing writer. Jennifer/Penny is featured on the current season of Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew seeking treatment for sex addiction. In my opinion, she’s the only tolerable person on the show, so while her first blog entry on HuffPost is a little weird, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it’ll get better from there.